The ancient Sumerians practiced slavery around 2000 BC, possibly earlier but we don’t have the proof.
It isn’t super clear what race they were, but they’re from the same area (mesopotamia) as semitic-speaking peoples who were linked to Arabs. Not gonna bet my life on it, but I’d guess they’re not evil whities?
And pretty much every major civilization followed suit. Guess what, humans be like that.
Yknow what, actually, let me quickly google this. I’ve got a lot of spite to take out on this garbage Western-obsessed racist perspective.
Here’s a list of what countries banned slavery, and when!
1777 - State of Vermont, an independent Republic after the American Revolution, becomes first sovereign state to abolish slavery
1792 - Denmark bans import of slaves to its West Indies colonies, although the law only took effect from 1803.
1807 - Britain passes Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, outlawing British Atlantic slave trade.
1807 - United States passes legislation banning the slave trade, effective from start of 1808.
1811 - Spain abolishes slavery, including in its colonies, though Cuba rejects ban and continues to deal in slaves.
1813 - Sweden bans slave trading
1814 - Netherlands bans slave trading
1817 - France bans slave trading, but ban not effective until 1826
1833 - Britain passes Abolition of Slavery Act, ordering gradual abolition of slavery in all British colonies. Plantation owners in the West Indies receive 20 million pounds in compensation
1833 - Great Britain and Spain sign a treaty prohibiting the slave trade
1819 - Portugal abolishes slave trade north of the equator
1819 - Britain places a naval squadron off the West African coast to enforce the ban on slave trading
1823 - Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society formed. Members include William Wilberforce
1846 - Danish governor proclaims emancipation of slaves in Danish West Indies, abolishing slavery
1848 - France abolishes slavery
1851 - Brazil abolishes slave trading
1858 - Portugal abolishes slavery in its colonies, although all slaves are subject to a 20-year apprenticeship
1861 - Netherlands abolishes slavery in Dutch Caribbean colonies
1862 - U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaims emancipation of slaves with effect from January 1, 1863; 13th Amendment of U.S. Constitution follows in 1865 banning slavery
1886 - Slavery is abolished in Cuba
1888 - Brazil abolishes slavery
1924 - Ottoman Empire
1926 - League of Nations adopts Slavery Convention abolishing slavery
1929 - Iran
1948 - United Nations General Assembly adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including article stating “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”
1970 - Oman
1905, 1981, and 2007 - Mauritania
Please take note, some countries still haven’t outlawed slavery? Are there any predominantly white ones on that list? No lol
On to voting! The Ancient Greeks, more specifically Athenians, who are considered to have been white, established the first democracy in about 500 BC, wherein they didn’t allow women to vote. So sure, nasty white men, wah wah, but this went on for well over two thousand years, uncontested, across every race. Let’s see…
Here’s a list of what order countries gave women the vote, and when! (Obviously, the US, Australia, and Canada didn’t let Black people or indigenous people vote until later, and that was a problem of racism, but seriously lmfao look at this list)
1893 New Zealand
1902 Australia*
1906 Finland
1913 Norway
1915 Denmark
1917 Canada**
1918 Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia
1919 Netherlands
1920 United States
1921 Sweden
1928 Britain, Ireland
1931 Spain
1934 Turkey
1944 France
1945 Italy
1947 Argentina, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan
1949 China
1950 India
1954 Colombia
1957 Malaysia, Zimbabwe
1962 Algeria,
1963 Iran, Morocco
1964 Libya
1967 Ecuador
1971 Switzerland
1972 Bangladesh
1974 Jordan
1976 Portugal
1988 Namibia
1990 Western Samoa
1993 Kazakhstan, Moldova
1994 South Africa
2005 Kuwait
2006 United Arab Emirates
2011 - Saudi Arabia
Hm, what color are these people again? Since this is clearly about race for some reason, despite every country clearly doing the same shit?
What I wanna know, is how the fuck can people claim the USA is racist because slavery, but not say fuck all regards the current slave trade going on in the middle East and Africa?
because they blame white people now for the actions of those who are dead, and blame everyone else’s actions throughout history on white people if they can’t ignore it completely or twist it to make it out to be a good thing
True. How many articles did I read while researching this that completely failed to mention the slavery already existing in Africa, why couldn’t I find a single date or a single article exploring that history that didn’t jump straight into the transatlatic slave trade, why are articles on or even REFERENCES TO the arab slave trade so hard to find, why did I find maybe TWO entire articles that opened with “While some africans did keep slaves they were much nicer to them” when lol actually it depended wildly on the region and where they got the slaves (prisoners of war were frequently chattel and as I said this industry built empires in africa) and only ONE article I found TOUCHED on that
Hm
I forgot to mention in my OP that the arab slave trade began fucking 500 years before the transatlantic slave trade and didnt end until pressure from european counties stopped it in the 20th century. If you believe that they even stopped lol.
Also don’t forget:
The modern day word for “Slavery” comes from prolific, historical forced servitude of SLAVIC – eastern European – people. Most of whom are Polish, who are white.
Slavic people were enslaved (in terms of indisputable documentation anyway) starting around the 6th-9th century, far before the Transatlantic slave trade. They were enslaved by EVERYONE. Western Europeans, Arabs, Africans, Mongols, and other Asian ethnic groups, which carried over to the U.S. as well especially (as recorded at least) during the 1900s-1950s, far more recently than chattel slavery in the U.S.
White people have actually provided THE largest slave population globally between at LEAST the 9th century and now. It continues into the modern age. In Russia alone there are over 180,000 Slavics in human trafficking per year to this day. The Slavic slave trade is in fact, still thriving, even though slavery is supposed to be illegal. And you know, that’s actually pretty fucking weird, considering we’re one of the smallest global populations of people.
Pro-white attitudes originate in SLAVERY and the BUYING AND SELLING of white people going all the way back to at least the time of the pyramids, especially white women. White people were considered exotic - no surprise since we make up the GLOBAL MINORITY in terms of race, and so people in other countries (asia, the middle east, africa) saw white people as an imported commodity to show off how wealthy they were, like a fancy car or an animal of the highest breeding. White women with blond/“gold” hair and light colored eyes were the most highly sought prize because - again - rarity – and this attitude STILL persists today in non-white countries, especially Arab countries. Hm, now what does buying people because they’re rare and exotic and show off your wealth sound like?
Africans, especially northern Africans (Morocco for instance, and other Berber African states), were raiding European coastlines for slaves as far north as Britain hundreds of years before the Transatlantic Slave Trade. More than 3.5 million Slavics alone were sold into slavery by North Africans. Nevermind all the western Europeans they also took, or all the slaves taken by the Arabs on top of that.
Most African slaves didn’t even go to the United States colonies. Only 4-5% of Africans were ever imported here. The majority of African slaves (95-96%) went to the Indies and Central/South America, primarily on Spanish ships, to work plantations and silver mines for the Spaniards who drove out, enslaved, and/or killed the Native Central and South Americans. The Spaniards favored male slaves for hard labor and took very few female slaves, making reproduction among the slaves low, which then required them to keep going back to Africa for more slaves to replace the ones who died, which is the reason the number of slaves taken on the Transatlantic slave trade is so astronomically huge, not because they went to the U.S. on English ships.
Indentured Servitude in America was in fact Slavery -IF- you belonged to the “wrong race of ‘white’ ” – again, Slavics, as well as other groups like the Irish, appalachians, were not considered equal to, say, English citizens.
There’s a largely false notion that indentured servants had all kinds of human rights that slaves didn’t have. ON PAPER, this was “true”, because these work contracts were written specifically to deceive people into signing their lives away into inescapable debt, promising a “limited time work contract” to establish themselves, - but only if they weren’t in debt by the end of the contract, in a rigged system meant to put you further into debt each consecutive year. A lot of the time these contracts were written in a language the workers who signed it couldn’t read and didn’t understand and it was done on purpose and often targeting the most vulnerable and desperate populations of European people, again on purpose. If you actually tried to exercise these rights and belonged to certain white racial groups (Slavics, Irish, Appalachians), you were punished, tortured, or killed with little or no consequence or repercussions, if you weren’t worked to death first. Most of these people were forced to work in isolated encampments and towns belonging to their contractors where their injustices weren’t witnessed by the general population and where their rights couldn’t be enforced, where even the roads in and out were heavily controlled, and most people of other “superior” white races preferred it that way because of systematic racism and desired segregation from “inferior” Slavics, Irish, and Appalachians.
Your children inherited your debt if you died or were killed, either until they worked it off or, more likely, also died to pass it on to next of kin. There were laws about how young children had to be to work, but this was largely ignored again without any legal consequence, and small children often died in dangerous conditions because of this.
Work contractors would hire teams of thugs to keep their workers “in their place” and outright assassinate anyone who tried to exercise their “equal rights as citizens” and intimidate the rest of their workers into silence. If you tried to run away from your debt contract, they would hunt you down and either kill you or throw you into hard labor prisons until, again, you either worked off your debt or died trying. Even if your contractor kicked you out on their terms, they would STILL send assassins after you, your wives, your children.
The government and police often outright refused to get involved because even THEY were terrified of these work contractors – who were basically just as bad or worse than mafia.
When primarily WHITE workers revolted against all of this, the government finally stepped in. The contractors got off scott-free, while oppressed workers were charged with crimes and many of their few rights they still had were further stripped away, and those who managed to get away from their contractors were blackballed from entire towns and cities from working jobs, buying homes, or even being able to make purchases for basic survival supplies like food.
The only reason this changed is eventually, around the 1940’s-1950’s, much more recently than the abolition of slavery, the government cracked down hard on economic practices to recover from the World Wars and Great Depression.
The whole concept of a “unified white race” is bullshit and also extremely new.Thiswasn’t even a thing in my grandparents’ time. It was barely a concept in my parents’ time, and I’m not that old. If you were Polish, then you were Polish. If you were English, then you were English. If you were French, then you were French. You weren’t “white” to anyone except someone who WASN’T “white”. This only just changed the last couple generations, less than 100 years ago. The reason that, in America, we have a concept of a “white race”, is because of racial mixing. Most “white people” in America these days have heavily mixed lineage. Largely because, around my Great Grandparents’ and Grandparents’ time, you had mixed-race marriages between different European races because of rebellious youth romance, and even then, it wasn’t accepted. You were expected to marry someone of your own race exclusively (German with German, Polish with Polish, Irish with Irish, English with English, Norwegian with Norwegian, etc) and if you didn’t you were shunned,excommunicated,disowned, you were subject to discrimination for being a “mixed race couple”, you were barred from businesses, you and your children were subject to possible hate crimes. The only time people made exceptions was if someone of an “undesirable” race was independently wealthy – and you’d better watch out that someone’s family you marry with never takes you to court for it, because the courts will make sure they take your money and leave you with nothing because of their race vs yours.
A big thing people talk about frequently now is that “white people don’t get discriminated against for their name” – it should be noted this is also extremely new, and in large parts because of huge efforts – including war, enslavement, genocide, etc etc etc to “Anglicize” everything, largely by the British and French. When “white people” first came to this country, a lot didn’t have Anglicized names. They had traditional Irish, Scottish, Polish, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, etc “heathenistic” or “pagan” names. Just like people of Black or Spanish names get treated differently today, “white” people got treated just the same back then for having names that weren’t “proper” names common among the English and French. When Irish and Slavics and other “inferior” races came to the U.S. back then, they often changed their names to a “more acceptable” Anglicized name, similar to how a lot of Asian-Americans adopt new names when immigrating to America today, or naming their children “American” names instead of traditional names, to better assimilate into American culture. If you were someone who didn’t assimilate in this way, you were treated far worse for holding onto the culture of your homeland and people, and often a target for hate crimes and systematic racism.
“White people” having “privilege” in this country isn’t because of skin color, its because of mass, VIOLENT, racist erasure of all of our unique cultures from Europe by English and French imperialism.
Do they think white people went to Africa and just rounded up free black people? Those slaves were purchased from African slavers.
As a black woman, it hurts me to hear when some people sling around “nigger” like it’s nothing. In reality, it is a filthy word, one that carries centuries’ worth of weight when used against the black community. When our ancestors were brought to America to be sold into slavery, this word was practically all they were referred to. It was originally a word to describe the inhabitants of Niger, but over time, it became associated with beatings, lynchings, and angry slavemasters. Black people were forced to work for no pay, and were met with violence when they didn’t comply. They had to live in small little shacks while the slavemasters lived in much bigger houses. Even in the 1940s, only a few decades ago, black people were being killed because they were thought of as subhuman “niggers”.
Eventually, a couple of black people decided they liked the N-word, and gradually, the African-American community adopted the word as their own in an effort to soften the impact of suffering through daily discrimination and oppression. This is why you often hear black people refer to each other by “nigga”. However, this does not give white people a right to say this word, because, due to the current power imbalance, in which white people use their privilege to keep putting the other races down, the word still holds a truckload of emotional baggage when you use it.
I often hear white people ask if they can at least sing the word when it’s in a song. Usually, I just ignore them. Trust me, it gets tiring to hear the same questions about racism over and over. However, I feel nice today, and, as much as it hurts to say it, I have reluctantly come up with a compromise I hope you white people will like.
You may sing along to songs with the N-word in it, but only when you’re absolutely alone, such as in the car or in the shower. I can’t control what you do inside your own house or your car. But whenever you’re in a public place, especially when POC may be around, I would find it very respectful of you to please skip over the word. It’s just one word, and you’re doing us all a favor by not using the word around us. It hurts us to hear it.
some geek: um not all cops r bad ? my dad’s a cop he doesnt kill black people
me internally: all cops are shitty because all cops are accomplices to the systemic repression carried out by the state and they’re agents of violence on both the structural and the individual level….by doing their job aka being a ‘good cop’ theyre carrying out a level of brutal violence and violation that police oversight committees and journalists refuse to see. U can’t demilitarize an institution that protects capitalism, breaks strikes, and upholds white supremacy. U cant sensitivity train away the fundamentally racist, antiblack, and xenophobic purpose of an institution that was created to segregate and criminalize and brutalize people because its very notions of criminality and aggressiveness belong to white supremacy.
everything about what the police are supposed to do is the problem and all cops participate in this. cops exist to maintain the law and order of the capitalist class, to maintain the white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, to criminalize and brutalize the poor, the queer, and people of color. all others whose existence challenges the system will be subdued. there are no good cops
what i say: FUCK YA DAD TOO BITCH! I SAID WHAT I SAID!
I wish that anti-bullying campaigns would stop arguing that “anyone can be bullied”/that “it’s completely random who the bullying victim is” cause it’s usually not just “anyone” who’s being bullied - it’s the disabled kids, the neurodivergent kids, the kids of color, the fat kids, the mentally ill kids, the poor kids, the transgender kids, the gender nonconforming kids, the non-straight kids. We won’t get anywhere with stopping bullying if we don’t confront the underlying reasons causes it’s no accident that it’s the kids belonging to marginalized groups who ends up being bullying victims. Bullying is not just a “random” evil it’s an expression of the ableism, racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, fatphobia and transhobia in our society and it’s about time that we confront that in our anti-bullying campaigns.
Edited version. Please reblog this version instead if you’ve reblogged the unedited version.
I’m late, I’ve been dealing with L I F E, however first, I would like to say rest in power to representative and freedom fighter John Lewis. For 50+ years you fought on the behalf of black people, took beatings, arrested, hosed, dogs sicced on you and you never stopped fighting! Thank you!
Picture: Rep Lewis projected on the defaced Robert E Lee statue on Monument Ave in Richmond, Va, July 2020.
I couldn’t care less about what those of ZERO melanin content are saying in my comment section. It will always be BLACK LIVES MATTER until my black life is valued just as much as my white counterparts. All lives cannot matter until BLACK LIVES MATTER. All lives can not matter until police officers and white men are held accountable for murdering unarmed black people and people of color! All lives can not matter until black people can walk into a hospital and receive the same adequate healthcare as white people. All lives can not matter when you’re shot in the street for trying to deesacalate your AUTISTIC patient. All lives can not matter when a black man can be jogging in his neighborhood but he somehow looks “suspicious” so two white men are allowed to get away with murder UNTIL video surfaced and sent social media into an uproar. All lives can not matter until the police officers that murdered Breonna Taylor are charged for murdering her in her own home on a no knock warrant for someone that they already had in custody. All lives can not matter until the police that murdered Elijah McClain and then JOKED about it on camera are charged for killing an unarmed black man because of a ski mask ALTHOUGH he had a health condition that caused him to always be cold. ALL LIVES CAN NOT MATTER UNTIL WE DON’T HAVE TO EXPLAIN OUR REASONINGS FOR WEARING HOODIES, SKI MASK, JOGGING, WORKING, SLEEPING, and PLAYING. ALL LIVES CAN NOT MATTER when you have a grown black man crying out for his deceased mother because he can not breath due to an ILLEGAL chokehold by a police officer who smugly looks into the camera with no remorse AFTER a store owner FALSELY accused him of using a counterfeit $20 bill. ALL LIVES CAN NOT MATTER UNTIL BLACK LIVES MATTER!
BLACK LIVES MATTER isn’t just a chant, this shit is life or death. MY LIFE DEPENDS ON A MF’ER SEEING MY HUMANITY AND NOT MY SKIN COLOR AND DECIDING NOT TO END IT. So, yes, BLACK LIVES MATTER♥️✊ because no one is free until EVERYONE is FREE!
It’s pride month soon so the posts are rolling in and it is just absolutely incredible how white gays have managed to center themselves in every conversation about the AIDS epidemic.
I do not want to see literally any commentary about the AIDS epidemic that does not specifically denote how the majority of people who died and a huge reason it was allowed to rampage was because it was killing black people specifically. And to this day, more black people die of aids than all of the other demographics combined.
We only make up 13% of the US population and yet we still make up the majority of deaths and we haven’t even begun to talk about how hiv/aids has been left un and under treated in African countries due to nothing but colonialism and white supremicist greed.
So no. I don’t want to talk about the aids epidemic unless black peoples are included in that narrative.
So anyway, as a black bisexual woman gay white men can shut the fuck up.
This post is absolutely vile. I’m not going to call it anything else. I’d be happy to reblog a post about the impact of AIDS on the black community that didn’t minimize the impact on the gay community.
And don’t start with the “white gays” thing. Don’t. It was all gay men. The Reagan administration let them die because they were gay. There were people like Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan saying they deserved to die for being gay. A relatively popular belief was that AIDS was god’s punishment for homosexuality. This applied to all gay men. White gay men were not protected from AIDS or from homophobia. Entire communities were dying.
AIDS used to be called “the gay cancer” or GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency).
HIV continues to be a health crisis in many African countries and there are a lot of important conversations to be had about that, but this post is just being homophobic.
I don’t know how to explain to you that as a black queer woman I am specifically talking about the ways in which black queer people have been erased from this conversation. Y’all are not about to all lives matter this post. Please
Okay, so I was raised to be ‘color blind’ - to treat everyone with the same level of respect and love that I would treat anyone else.
And that, on its face, sounds really fantastic. Yay! ALL lives matter!
But, that view point hides that different races have different experiences than my own. From my (white) perspective, everyone is treated equally based on their merits. Maybe less so if you’re poor or you’re ugly, but for the most part if I don’t do something racist to someone, then racism isn’t active anymore. I and a lot of my suburbanite friends can recall when we realized that 'oh, wow, racism is still really real’. For me, I can 'not see race’ and thus, tada racism isn’t an issue.
But for a person of color - [I’m doing some assuming here because all I can base this on is listening to others experiences, if any of my friends of color want to chime in I would greatly appreciate it] - they are a direct recipient of racism, particularly systemic racism every day. So if as a friend of theirs who is white I pretends that race doesn’t exist, I’m not helping to curb the racism that exists all around us that I’m not subject to.
For a person of color, if they try to be 'color blind’ they’re still hit with their resumes not being responded to because they have a black or middle eastern sounding name or they still have getting pulled over randomly and feeling fearful. They still have getting followed around in the store. They still have to send their children out terrified that they may not come home - not just because of a car accident like white people, but because they might curse under their breath at a cop, or they might walk through the wrong neighborhood, or sit in a park. They still have the police being SUPER ready to shoot them at any moment. Racism doesn’t go away when someone is 'color blind’ if they’re a person of color.
So, being colorblind is the essence of white privilege. It lets me pretend racism doesn’t exist, while helping hide the racism that minorities are dealing with every day.
Saying 'All Lives Matter’ and trying to be color blind isn’t fighting racism, it’s hiding it and pretending it doesn’t exist. And that doesn’t work for any problems, much less huge, vast societal problems rooted in hundreds of years of slavery and oppression.
I do see color. I see my friends of color, and they matter.
The number of people globally talking about Baltimore, MD, and previously Ferguson, MO, undermines the “Rioting doesn’t do anything” argument. You - middle class, white person - are now talking about or reading about systemic racism publicly when there was a zero percent chance you would notice it before.
Do you know how I know that? Because none of my friends (including me) posted about or read about the literal hundreds of peaceful candlelight vigils that were held for black men killed by police in the last year.
The last forty years of politely asking for police to stop killing minorities without repercussion hasn’t changed anything. “Hey, mind not beating handcuffed black men to death? How about not shooting 7 year old black girls in the face? If it troubles you, can you find it in your heart not to shoot twelve year old children carrying toys? Gee, that’d be swell!”
So for the love of fucking god, can we please start talking about “Why are Americans being murdered by police so often that we’re rioting” instead of listing *property damage* related to said riots?
Systemic racism isn’t a problem for minorities to solve. It is not the job of rioters to “change things” in an effective manner.The people who maintain and implement systemic racism are the people who need to change the system and “solve the problem” of systemic racism.
If riots are what has to happen in order to raise white america’s attention level, so be it.
White America isn’t allowed to create a justice system that completely disenfranchises minorities, direct funding away from predominantly minority schools, change voting hours and laws to make it harder for minorities to vote, redistrict the effectiveness of their vote away, present only wealthy candidates who aren’t familiar with the issues that poor Americans deal with, aim the justice system disproportionately at minorities and then prevent them from voting because they’re felons, use disproportionately long sentencing and make a legal defense too expensive to carry out, and then claim that it’s black america’s job to change things - but only in a manner that we approve of. Fuck. That. Noise.
And then on top of that, posting bullshit fucking condescending posts about rioting? About how you don’t *approve* of it? Jesus. It’s a good way to get added to the “List of people who should be punched in the groin.
"Stop "shaking your head” at rioters. Start “shaking your head” at systemic racism.
Edit to address a comment below:
>>chicagochefleesaid: I’m on your side and yet I’m white. So how is this a white problem? Racism can’t be cured by more racism. This is a backward, idiot, racist problem. No color involved. These same idiots are shooting dogs for no reason and are against gay marriage
This is an unfortunately simplistic view of the situation. Systemic racism (meaning, codified laws and policies aimed at disenfranchising minorities) are very very real racist problems and have nothing to do with ‘backward idiots’. They have to do with every white American who votes for politicians that favor redistricting to prevent candidates minorities support from gaining office, laws that are harder on minorities than whites, juries that are more likely to convict a black person than a white person, police that stop and randomly search minorities more than whites.
As a white person, you have the option to call for color blindness and then just wait with your head in the sand until this all blows over. But fuck that noise. We need to dig racism out at it’s core and shine the light of day on it.
Translation: “Hello, I have no understanding of systemic racism and the structural inequalities that cause people of color to have less opportunities to tell their stories. I believe that becoming an author is easy and definitely not something that favors the more economically advantaged, who have more time and leisure to pursue their dreams and are also overwhelmingly white because of racist historical policies. I think books magically appear on bookshelves or in people’s recommendations solely by their own merit instead of having to pass through an industry full of mostly white gatekeepers who put a market value on each aspiring author’s manuscript by judging it through their white middle class lens. I don’t see race because I delight in my own ignorance!”
I’ve noticed over the years that when a white person kills a lot of people with the aid of guns, we are told that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Usually, the conversation then pivots away from guns to the epidemic of mental health issues in America. In these situations, the gun rights advocates’ response to gun violence often is not punitive, but rather positively identifying a public health issue that contributes to the violence. This demonstrates that gun rights advocates are capable of identifying a societal problem that contributes to mass violence and proposing a solution which neither criminalizes nor punishes communities for gun violence.
Relatedly–because these conversations sometimes shift to so-called “black-on-black” crime and gun violence–we see a very different reaction when black people commit gun violence in segregated cities. Instead of identifying the deeper societal wounds (centuries-long intergenerational trauma, systemic racism, poverty, lack of services and opportunity, poor wages, etc.) and offering effective sympathetic solutions (investing in communities, providing more services, regionalizing taxation, dare I say reparations) as we have established they can, many of those same gun rights advocates offer different, punitive solutions: namely more police, more surveillance, and more jails.
In the former scenario, guns aren’t the issue, communities aren’t the issue, gun culture isn’t the issue, but–with sympathy and thoughts and prayers–mental health is the issue we should focus on. As a society, it is our problem to solve, even if it never gets solved. In the latter case, guns are an issue, minority communities and “black culture” are issues, and lacking sympathy, “cracking down” on violence is the issue we should focus on. As a society, it is not our problem; it is “their” problem to solve in the city, and if anyone tries to take funds away from police, we will work hard to get the police their funding back, or get them even more. In other words, action actually gets taken in the second scenario.
Why did I want to share this perspective? Especially for our fellow Americans who struggle to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism, I hope that these two scenarios shed light on its existence and function: how it can permeate conversations and mindsets, political talking points, how we see fellow Americans, what policy solutions are proposed in different situations, who is seen as sympathetic, who is responsible for resolving societal problems, and who is most likely to feel the force of state violence and who gets exceptions made for them. You, kind reader, may not be a racist, and all gun rights activists may not be racists, but it is important to acknowledge that racists and systemic racism play very real and very detrimental roles in our politics, policy, and discourse. And it never hurts to use our privilege to point it out. Short of doing nothing, it’s literally the least we can do.
what really fucking bothers me in conversations about racism and saying that some work has racist elements people always counter with “I don’t think the author had deliberate racist ideology in mind” cause it’s like that doesn’t fucking matter. it doesn’t have to be deliberate to be racist. most people don’t go hee hee hoo hoo I’m gonna put racist things in this. everyone was raised in a racist society and covert racism exists and yes needs to be examined in ourselves and everywhere and yes even in works you like author “deliberate” intent or no
this applies to other forms of bigotry too. listen to the voices of those who have to live under systemic oppression
I’m going to say this and then run away from Tumblr as fast as I can while my account gets put through the grinder but I’m getting really really really tired of seeing stuff boiled down to “white people bad”.
And before you get started I Get why this happens and why people say these things. I don’t even necessarily disagree. I’m just a little burnt out about hearing how horrible, awful, evil, and irredeemable white people are and how they need to be eradicated. As someone who’s white (or at least white presenting and lives a white experience) I’m not going to pretend like I LOVE hearing my friends talk about how much they hate white people. I get it. I’m not going to tell them to stop, my feelings don’t matter more than theirs, but gosh do I wish they wouldn’t say those things? Of course.
It’s just, I KNOW, why people feel that way. Hell, I feel that way when I speak to my family who still lives on our tribe’s reservation, but even despite all that I refuse to agree that turning hate speech towards white people is the best we can do for moving the conversation forward.
As a woman of color, I’m going to tell you right here that I understand where you’re coming from and I appreciate your honesty.
The truth is, there are good and bad people in every race, every ethnicity. I’ve run into my fair share of white people who are totally amazing (like my white friends whom I love with my heart and soul) and BIPOC who are downright awful (like the radfems of color). My Chinese mother is colorist, antiblack, homophobic, and ableist, and she is as much a product of her environment as anyone else.
The fact is, we all got stuff to unpack and things to deconstruct. None of us are islands. We are all products of our environments and we all grew up exposed to everything that comes with a capitalist society. None of us are free from those influences. Unless you’ve spent your whole life living in a cave off the grid, you’re not free from them.
What needs to be done is we all need to do the work. We all got shit to heal. We all got responsibilities to take, and accountabilities to hold ourselves to. And we need to keep doing these things, and then keep doing these things.
